An Infrastructure for Cache Customization

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Web caching has emerged as one solution for improving client latency on the web. Cache effectiveness depends on the policies used to route requests to other caches and servers, to maintain up-to-date web objects and to remove objects from the cache. Traditional caches apply one set of policies, which determines the efficiency as well as the effectiveness of the caches. This set of policies often does not exploit the diversity inherent in different web objects caches and clients. Policies that do exploit this diversity result in convoluted caching policies that attempt to combine multiple policies and guess at the unknown characteristics of web objects, caches, and clients.

Technical Descriptions

CacheL Grammar: Provides a BNF description of the domain specifi language that we implement.
Support for Removal Policies. Customizing the removal policies implemented by a cache are one of the more difficult operations. Therefore, this page describes the support that the cache must provide to allow customization of the removal policy.
Cache Operations

Software

DavisSim: A simulator based on the Wisconsin Cache simulator for evaluating different web caching policies.
PoliSquid: employs our infrastructure within squid to provide customization of caching policies.
squid2ucd: A program that converts the squid access logs into a format that is readable by the DavisSim program.

Papers

J. Fritz Barnes and Raju Pandey. ``Providing Dynamic and Customizable Caching Policies.'' To Appear in USENIX Second Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS '99), October 1999, Boulder, Colorado, USA.
J. Fritz Barnes and Raju Pandey. ``CacheL: Language Support for Customizable Caching Policies.'' To Appear in Proceedings of the Fourth International Web Caching Workship (WCW '99), March 1999, San Diego, California, USA. (PostScript) (BibTeX)

J. Fritz Barnes